In the thesis, judged good enough to award the author both a master’s degree and a law degree, he opposed the Supreme Court ruling legalizing use of contraception by unmarried couples, said working women are detrimental to the family and that the government should make policy that favors married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.”
He also advocated in the paper making it more difficult to divorce, imposing character education in public schools to teach Judeo-Christian values, and repealing federal tax credits for child care expenses because they encourage women to work. Oh, and the graduate income tax, in place since 1916, this scholar wrote is “socialist.”
Now, I wrote a bunch of stuff when I was in college that might not stand up today, but I was 22. The man I have quoted, was 34 years old with experience in the military and in the business world.
Today, he is the governor-elect of Virginia, a state (actually a commonwealth) that was the capital of the Confederacy, closed its public schools rather than integrate, made black/white marriages illegal and where I learned the N word and what the Stars and Bars were when I lived there as a child.
The progressive area of Virginia, home to many federal workers and contractors, is choked by traffic due to Republican refusal to do anything about transportation. The rest of the state is populated by country-club rednecks, militarists and ignoramuses.
After 12 years of moderate Democrats holding the governorship, the party lost today because it nominated a conservative who ran away from President Obama, holds generally Republican views, ran an unbelievably incompetent campaign and gave the liberals and blacks who gave Virginia to Obama last year absolutely nothing to vote for.
The clever thing McDonnell did was to utterly ignore the social isseus. I was utterly amazed that the Deeds campaign never brought up the Pat Robertson connection until an independent group unearthed McDonnell's Regent University thesis. And even then, it was handled ham-handedly. Maybe Virginians should have nominated Brian Moran, who was thought to be too liberal for the state. But such a candidate might have been able to mobilize the base, as Deeds was unable to do. (Given McDonnell's long ties to Robertson, he did not have to do anything overt to mobilize his base, so he could pretend to be a moderate). Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that if you are going to try to go to the Center, you'd better have a candidate who appears centered.
ReplyDeleteThe Dems simply nominated the wrong candidate. Even slimy Terry McAuliffe could have wiped the floor with McDonnell. By the way, the thesis was not actually unearthed by an independent group. It was the Washington Post, using old-fashioned shoe leather (in this case, perhaps, patent leather) to find the thesis after the candidate stupidly referred to it in passing in an interview on something else. All in all, I still believe that "the people" always elect what they deserve.
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